There must have been some mighty long faces in the CNN newsroom when the missing Malaysian airplane story petered out. Now what were they going to obsess about 24/7? Maybe…serious news? Like the midterm elections? Ha! Who are we kidding?
Well, praise the good Lord for creating the little wiggly bugs and the germs, because now CNN has ebola. Is ebola a serious topic? Yes, but not when CNN is covering it. First, there was the endless dissection of what the nurses at Texas Presbyterian Hospital might or might not have been wearing when they treated Thomas Eric Duncan. It’s one thing to report that there were significant lapses in hospital protocol. It’s another to spend many hours speculating about what these lapses might have been because you’re trying to kill time before the next CDC conference. Then, when the nurses were being moved to other hospitals, CNN treated us to live coverage of the vehicles transporting the nurses, including ominous shots of the airplanes which were going to fly them to their destinations. Why did we need to see that? Were there infectious bodily fluids condensing on the wings? This provides more evidence for my personal theory that CNN + airplanes = pure ridiculousness.
So thank you, CNN, for showing us yet again that you are capable of taking any news story and riding it straight into carnival barker territory.
Ah, but there was also something missing for me in the coverage…some elusive element…I mean, besides substance. I wasn’t sure what it was, but then I remembered Don Lemon playing with his toy plane, and it all came back to me. The news anchors need a prop! And I know just the thing–the plushie version of the ebola germ, brought to us by Giant Microbes. You can take your plague reporting to a whole new level of dramatic when you’re waving an actual germ around in the studio. Hope you listen to my advice, CNN! You can’t make things much sillier than you already have, you know.
10/24/2014 at 5:18 am
What a great idea!! You’re naturally talented as a CNN concept-and-props-developer ! 😀
10/24/2014 at 9:20 pm
There you go, I’ve found my new calling 🙂 The CNN prop assistant…I will help make their shows even more laughable than they already are. Thank you for the suggestion 🙂
11/10/2014 at 12:34 pm
I agree completely. These carnival barkers wouldn’t know a journalist if they backed over him in an ice cream truck on the way to do yet another a “missing cute blonde girl” story.
The last time I wasted 5 minutes on CNN, they were actually reading Tweets from the Twit Zone and treating them as if what Bedwetter47 had to say on -well- any topic meant anything whatsoever.
In fairness, I have watched a couple of nighttime documentaries and Morgan Spurlock’s Inside Man. Most of it isn’t exactly “news” material, but at least it doesn’t suck shit the rest of the meaningless nonsense they air.
11/10/2014 at 6:55 pm
Yeah, I remember them reading Tweets on the air about the missing Malaysian plane, giving plenty of time to every conspiracy theory getting tweeted out, since, you know, the average CNN viewer is such an airplane expert.
I can’t say that I’m a huge fan of their documentaries… but the only one I’ve noticed is the Anthony Bourdain show, and since I’m not a foodie and not passionate about cooking that one leaves me kinda cold. Al Jazeera has much better docs 😉